Ever heard of Pecha-Kucha, I just did

There was a story this afternoon on NPR "Hate Long, Rambling Speeches? Try Pecha-Kucha" by Lucy Craft which is worth publicizing and whose lessons worth adopting.

Remember, how much time, we waste listening to "rambling" voices in company and lab meetings, now here is a presentation format that is worth adopting and help stop this menace.  Pecha-kucha (pronounced: PEH-chakh-cha), "chitchat" in Japanese, was devised by Tokyo architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein in 2003 as an antidote to PowerPoint flood.  The format is 20 slides, 20 seconds a slide, i.e., under 7 minutes in all.  Thanks to social media, like Facebook, pecha-kucha nights are happening all over the world, just not in labs and companies yet! 

Be a good citizen, save your co-workers and spread the word.

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Further Reading:

If you haven't, you Must(!) also read a famous essay published in Armed Forces Journal last year, "Dumb-dumb bullets" by T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps Officer, about how faith in PowerPoint does a disservice to the decision-making process.

Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.

Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement. . . read more